Hubble 'Time Machine' Looks 10,000 Years Into Future

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Astronomers have created a cosmic time machine of sorts to
project what part of the universe is going to look like 10,000
years into the future.

Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists
have calculated how stars in the globular cluster
Omega Centauri will move for millennia to come.

When it was first catalogued by the ancient Roman astronomer
Ptolemy 2,000 years ago, Omega Centauri was thought to be a
single star. Now this cluster, located almost 16,000 light-years
from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy, is known to be a swarm of
about 10 million stars, all orbiting a common center of gravity.
[ Video:
Hubble's vision of Omega Centauri's future ]

By analyzing archived images taken over a four-year period by
Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers have made the
most accurate measurements yet of the motions of more than
100,000 cosmic inhabitants of the
globular cluster, the largest survey to date to study the
movement of stars in any cluster.

"It takes high-speed, sophisticated computer programs to measure
the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur in only
four years' time," said astronomer Jay Anderson of the Space
Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who conducted the
study with fellow STScI astronomer Roeland van der Marel.
"Ultimately, though, it is Hubble's razor-sharp vision that is
the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this
cluster."

The astronomers used the Hubble images, which were taken in 2002
and 2006, to make a video simulation of the frenzied motion of
the cluster's stars. The simulation shows the stars' projected
migration over the next 10,000 years.

Identified as a globular star cluster in 1867, Omega Centauri is
one of roughly 150 such clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy.

The behemoth stellar grouping is the biggest and brightest
globular cluster in the Milky Way, and one of the few that can be
seen by the unaided eye. Omega Centauri is located in the
constellation Centaurus and is viewable in the southern skies.